Sulka's Game is a weblog by Sulka Haro. The subjects range from gaming to dragonflies.

Virtual Goods & Currencies Pricing Report

Do you need to deal with virtual economies in your job, such as selling services or virtual goods online? Here’s a hot tip for you – the Virtual Economists’ excellent Social Games Virtual Goods & Currencies Pricing Report + Data bundle was just discounted to $199 from it’s original $699 price. I thought the original price was good value, but now it’s a steal.

What’s inside? Data from 18 social games across different platforms, crunched into learnings. The titles includes the obvious popular games like Farmville and Travian, but also interesting other titles like Ninja Saga and Ravenskye City. I’ve personally played about two thirds of the games but not to the point of having gotten all the data contained inside, so the report had a few big surprises.

As part of pricing items for Habbo when I was working at Sulake, one of the hot topics was how to price items. You don’t want to offer things too cheap, but then pricing items too high also makes you lose sales. The max price we ever charged for a single item (that I can remember) was 75 credits, or about 11 euros, which a lot of people thought was insanely expensive and generally all the purchasers of the item were deeply engaged big spenders. Looking at the report, the most expensive item in the list costs a whopping 650 euros! Color me shocked.

Another piece I found incredibly useful is analysis and data on the distribution of vanity vs functional items in various titles. Which one works better has been a big discussion point in the industry for years, where people seem to be segregated into the vanity and functional camps of thought. This reflects itself in the titles being analysed, where quite a few are 100% functional item driven (yay Travian) while some are very much driven by decorative vanity items. This itself is useful as a piece of data, but Vili and Eino have gone as far as analyzing the pricing differences between vanity and functional items AND how different games offer you discounts based on volume purchases.

The bundle includes an excel sheet with all the original data for one’s own digging. I’ll have to remember to ask Vili if I can publish any of my own findings here. :) Anyway, go get yourself a copy of the report, so we’ll get more excellent analysis from the guys in the future.